Debian Weekly News - December 31st, 2002

Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Many of you will probably be celebrating New Year's Eve,
whilst doing so take a moment to reflect on the past year: What needs to be
done in the Free Software community? Where would be able to participate
actively?

51 Issues of DWN produced. You are currently reading the
51st issue, which means that this is also the 51st week of gathering
information on interesting activities of the Debian Project,
writing items, proofreading and translation. Even though the English version
is prepared only by a small group of people including one main editor, many
more people are involved before you can read the issue. Each issue is sent to
proofreaders, and translators also improve it. Each issue is also translated into
several other languages simultaneously.

Thanks to Contributors and Translators. A big thanks go to
Andre Lehovich and Matt Black who have contributed several items as well as
the many more people who contributed items less frequently. Many thanks to Rob
Bradford, Andreas Schuldei and Thomas Bliesener who proofread the
issues. Thanks also go to David Martínez Moreno, Frédéric Bothamy, Gustavo
Noronha Silva, Ignacio García, Lukasz Jachowicz, Miquel Vidal, Nobuhiro IMAI (今井伸広),
Oohara Yuuma (大原雄馬), Peter Karlsson, Pierre Machard and Thomas Bliesener who are
translating all issues into Catalan, French, German, Japanese, Polish,
Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

2002 GNU/Linux Timeline. End of the year is the
time people take a rest and reflect on what has happened in
the ending year. Our colleagues from Linux
Weekly News prepared the 2002 GNU/Linux Timeline.
Even though the economy was difficult worldwide, Free Software continues to
develop and gain strength. The timeline is split up by months, as
usual.

New Boot-Floppies for Woody. Eduard Bloch volunteered
to coordinate the next
release of Debian's boot-floppies. The next update to Debian 3.0 is planned
for about two months after r1, so there are at least one and a half months
left. The new boot-floppies will fix known outstanding problems in some
architectures and include a more recent kernel.

Donations Sought. At the end of this year, several
non-profit organizations that support Free Software are seeking donations.
For US residents these donations are tax-deductible. Over two thirds of the
Free Software Foundation (FSF) budget comes
from individual donors. The FSF recently launched their associate membership program. The GNOME Foundation
hopes to provide travel grants to some developers attending the annual GUADEC conference.
Software in the Public Interest (SPI)
accepts donations for the
Debian project.

Automatically Testing Users Existence. Matt Hope noticed
that a few packages check /etc/passwd to discover whether a user
exists. He thought that this could be a problem in systems that use alternate
authentication schemes such as NIS or LDAP. Matt Zimmerman advised him
to file bug reports against those packages and ask their respective
maintainers to use getent instead.

GTK+ 2.2 for Debian. Akira Tagoh (田郷明) reported
that the GTK+ team has released version 2.2 of the Gimp Toolkit family libraries (GTK+). The
libraries are compatible with version 2.0 but trigger a problem in libgnomeui.
Hence
GNOME 2 won't work with GTK 2.2 but GNOME 2.1 requires it. Therefore Akira
intends to upload new packages to unstable interimly.

More Alpha and Sparc Users soon? Jaldhar Vyas informed us
that Red Hat stopped
official support for all its releases for the Alpha and Sparc architectures.
Debian, however, still supports these architectures among others and users
enjoy the vast breadth of Free Software, bug fixes, and timely security
updates.

KDE 3.0.5a Packages for Woody. Ralf Nolden announced
that he uploaded Debian packages for KDE 3.0.5a to the KDE masterserver. This
upload includes the latest security updates for KDE. The archive can be
accessed via apt-get from download.us.kde.org. Packages for KDevelop 2.1.4 were also uploaded the
next day.

Embedding Debian GNU/Linux in a 32 MB CompactFlash.
Bao C. Ha describes the techniques he used to reduce a Debian installation to less
than 32 MB. Bao started with debootstrap which created a
121 MB bootable Debian filesystem with VPN/firewall/router functionality.
By removing documentation and compressing the root filesystem using the cloop
kernel module, he was able to reduce the size to 27.6 MB. The resulting
image is designed for the OpenBrick-E, a small hardware platform
optimized for Open Source/Free Software solutions. However, the video card
requires a non-free binary only XFree86 release.

Debian 3.0r1 Update CD Images. Steve McIntyre announced that
he has created a set of update CD images that contain new and updated packages
from 3.0r1. The images were originally made as two full CDs containing all 11
supported architectures, but upon feedback from
Jason Andrade, Steve created separate CDs for each architecture. Although
this will take up more disk space, it should be easier for users and also save
bandwidth. The files will be downloadable from regular locations when the server is up again, which will take
a couple of days.

Removing Detritus from /etc. Joey Hess investigated
his /etc directory and noticed a lot of cruft left over by
package removals that haven't cleaned up properly: dangling symlinks,
abandoned directories and so on. He came up with the idea of a special
Debian package that checks for any bits of detritus left over by other
packages in its own postrm script, and cleans it up.

Rebuilding all Debian Packages. Junichi Uekawa (上川純一) reported
about another pbuilder run.
Trying to recompile all source packages took from December 9th to 24th on his
machine. Only 529 packages failed to build from source, leaving over 6000
packages that built successfully. Gerhard Tonn also tried to recompile all C++
packages with GCC 3.2 prior to it being introduced as the standard compiler.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 12 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 165 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. Several people are submitting items already, but we are
still in need of volunteer writers who prepare items.
Please see the contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at dwn@debian.org.